Abbey presents a close study of Nietzche's works Human, All Too Human; Daybreak; and The Gay Science. Although these middle period works tend to be neglected in commentaries on Nietzsche, they repay close attention. Abbey's study of Nietzsche's middle period paints a vastly different portrait of the philosopher: a careful, sensitive analyst of moral life. This work fills a serious gap in the literature on Nietzsche.

When does Renaissance philosophy end, and Early Modern philosophy begin? Do Renaissance philosophers have something in common, which distinguishes them from Early Modern philosophers? And ultimately, what defines the modernity of the Early Modern period, and what role did the Renaissance play in shaping it? The answers to these questions are not just chronological. This book challenges traditional constructions of these periods, which partly reflect the prejudice that the Renaissance was a literary and artistic phenomenon, rather than a philosophical phase. The essays in this book investigate how the legacy of Renaissance philosophers persisted in the following centuries through the direct encounters of subsequent generations with Renaissance philosophical texts. This volume treats Early Modern philosophers as joining their predecessors as 'conversation partners': the 'conversations' in this book feature, among others, Girolamo Cardano and Henry More, Thomas Hobbes and Lorenzo Valla, Bernardino Telesio and Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes and Tommaso Campanella, Giulio Cesare Vanini and the anonymous Theophrastus redivivus.

Margaret Cavendish (1623 - 1673) was a philosopher, poet, scientist, novelist, and playwright of the seventeenth century. Her work is important for a number of reasons. It presents an early and compelling version of the naturalism that is found in current-day philosophy; it offers important insights that bear on recent discussions of the nature and characteristics of intelligence and the question of whether or not the bodies that surround us are intelligent or have an intelligent cause; it anticipates some of the central views and arguments that are more commonly associated with figures like Thomas Hobbes and David Hume. This is the first full account of Cavendish's philosophy and covers the whole span of her work. David Cunning begins with an overview of Cavendish's life and work before assessing her contribution to a wide range of philosophical subjects, including her arguments concerning materialism, experimentation, the existence of God, social and political philosophy and free will and compatibilism. Setting Cavendish in both historical and philosophical context, he argues that like Spinoza she builds on central tenets of Descartes' philosophy and develops them in a direction that Descartes himself would avoid. She defends a plenum metaphysics according to which all individuals are causally interdependent, and according to which the physical universe is a larger individual that constitutes all of reality. Cavendish is essential reading for students of seventeenth-century philosophy, early modern philosophy and seventeenth-century literature.

In the decades after its publication, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship served as a touchstone for such major philosophical and literary figures as Schopenhauer, Schleiermacher, and Schlegel, and was widely understood to be one of the greatest novels of the German canon. But in the decades and centuries following, the attention it has received in both disciplines has diminished in comparison to either Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther or his Elective Affinities. This volume follows the impetus of its early respondents to examine deeply what exactly Goethe's long and complicated novel is doing, and how it engages with problems and themes of human life. An interdisciplinary group of eminent scholars grapple with the novel's engagement with central philosophical questions such as individuality, development, and authority; aesthetic formation and narrative (and human) contingency; and gender, sexuality, and marriage. That these questions and their working-through in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre are in tension with one another speaks ultimately to how literature explores philosophical questions in ways that are open-ended, creative, and contain potential for new and different solutions to living with them. This unique philosophical approach to the form and purpose of a literary masterpiece illuminates new inroads into a novel at once famously complex and influential, and into the projects of one Germany's greatest writers.

This book gives a comprehensive overview of the ways in which the relation between German Idealism and feminist philosophy has been explored. It demonstrates the significance of German Idealism for feminist philosophy, and simultaneously brings out the relevance of feminist readings and interpretations for a critical understanding of German Idealism. Key Features: * Presents original work on the German Idealists and considers their legacy within feminist thought from different philosophical perspectives. * Incorporates perspectives from queer theory, new materialism and critical philosophy of race, and so explores German Idealism through the subversion and transformation of meanings and conceptual arrangements. * Challenges the epistemic boundaries of philosophy by engaging the thought of women contemporary with the German Idealists such as Bettina von Arnim and Karoline von Gunderrode. * Places the work of the German Idealists on gender, sexuality, marriage and family within the wider contexts of colonialism and European nation building. * Considers how several key concepts of German Idealism (such as subject, reason, enlightenment, autonomy and the sublime) have been central targets of feminist theory. * Includes a Black feminist critique of Kantian universalism. Fully reflecting the diversity that characterizes feminist thinking today, The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Feminist Philosophy is essential reading for scholars and graduate students of German idealism, feminist philosophy and feminist theory.

Paul Guyer is acknowledged as one of the world's foremost Kant specialists, and he collects here some of his most celebrated essays from the past decade and a half. The governing theme of the volume is the role of systematicity in Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy. Featuring two brand-new papers and an introduction to orient the reader, Kant's System of Nature and Freedom will be an essential purchase for anyone working on the history of philosophy and related areas of ethics, philosophy of science, and metaphysics.

Michael Giffin offers a reading of Austen's six published novels against the background of a 'long 18th century' that stretched from the Restoration to the Regency. He demonstrates that Austen is a neoclassical author of the enlightenment who writes through the twin prisms of British Empiricism and Georgian Anglicanism. Giffin's focus is on how Austen's novels mirror a belief in natural law and natural order and how they reflect John Locke's theory of knowledge through reason, revelation, and reflection on experience.

Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the greatest philosophers and writers of the Eighteenth century. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Her most celebrated and widely-read work is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. This Guidebook introduces:

• Wollstonecraft s life and the background to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• The ideas and text of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• Wollstonecraft s enduring influence in philosophy and our contemporary intellectual life

It is ideal for anyone coming to Wollstonecraft s classic text for the first time and anyone interested in the origins of feminist thought. "

Written by an international team of contributors, this book offers a fresh set of interpretations of Fear and Trembling, which remains Kierkegaard's most influential and popular book. The chapters provide incisive accounts of the psychological and epistemological presuppositions of Fear and Trembling; of religious experience and the existential dimension of faith; of Kierkegaard's understanding of the relationship between faith and knowledge; of the purported and real conflicts between ethics and religion; of Kierkegaard's interpretation of the value of hope, trust, love and other virtues; of Kierkegaard's debts to German idealism and Protestant theology; and of his seminal contributions to the fields of psychology, existential phenomenology and literary theory. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and upper-level students of Kierkegaard studies, the history of philosophy, theology and religious studies.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays and poems on the transcendental movement in the United States became some of the most important literary pieces in American History. In this culmination of essays, Emerson takes the reader through different forms of philosophies that attempt to explain the world and man's purpose within it. Heavily vested in the philosophy of transcendentalism, though not one to label himself a true follower of the movement, Emerson believed that spirituality and wholeness were central to the ways in which humans could place themselves within nature. Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson is a collection of integral works that paved the way for much influential literature to come, including, Louisa May Alcott, and Margaret Fuller. With an eye-catching new cover and an informative note about the author, this edition of Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson is both modern and readable.

This reconstruction of the work of 'dialectical memory' in Hegel raises the fundamental question of the principle that presides on the articulation of history and indicates in Hegel's philosophy two alternative models of conceiving history: one that grounds history on 'ethical memory,' the other that sees justice as the moving principle of history.

Happiness in Kant's Practical Philosophy: Morality, Indirect Duties, and Welfare Rights examines the role and normative implications of Kant's understanding of happiness for his moral, political, and legal philosophy. Kant's underlying assumptions about happiness are rarely overtly discussed or given much detail in his works. By bringing these assumptions to the fore, Alice Pinheiro Walla sheds light on some puzzling claims and on the scattered, sometimes contradictory remarks Kant makes about happiness. The book shows that happiness shapes or indirectly influences Kant's methodology and many of his conclusions, including his views on the nature of practical rationality, meta-ethics, the role of the state, and of political justification. The challenge with happiness is that it is impossible to know for certain what will make us happy, and what we take to be happiness changes over our lifetime. The book argues that Kant offers a distinctive strategy for dealing with this indeterminacy of happiness, one rooted in understanding our duties to ourselves and others. Happiness in Kant's Practical Philosophy provides a map of the areas in which the concept of happiness or considerations about the happiness of individuals appear in Kant's practical works and analyses the way they relate to central themes of his practical theory.

Positive philosophy is the name that Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) gave to a new type of philosophizing that stands in contrast to the so-called negative philosophy that is predominant in modern rationalism. But what exactly is positive philosophy? Schelling on Truth and Person: The Meaning of Positive Philosophy argues that its meaning lies in a distinctive view of the human person as a seeker of truth. Truth is presented as historically woven in the movement of life with the phenomena of mythology and religion that reveal the human being's falling away from and return to the truth. Nikolaj Zunic demonstrates that this novel understanding of truth accompanies the development and expression of positive philosophy itself. The anthropological dimension of truth relates to self-knowledge, the soul, spirit, and personality, and Schelling's positive philosophy sheds light on the grand themes of the meaning of life, the ontological question (why is there something rather than nothing?), the enigma of knowledge and reason, and the affirmation of the existence of God. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in Schelling's late philosophy as well as broader questions in philosophy concerning meaning, truth, human nature, and rationality.

This book discusses the impetus-based physics of the Jesuit natural philosopher and mathematician Honore Fabri (1608-1688), a senior representative of Jesuit scientists during the period between Galileo's death (1642) and Newton's Principia (1687). It shows how Fabri, while remaining loyal to a general Aristotelian outlook, managed to reinterpret the old concept of "impetus" in such a way as to assimilate into his physics building blocks of modern science, like Galileo's law of fall and Descartes' principle of inertia. This account of Fabri's theory is a novel one, since his physics is commonly considered as a dogmatic rejection of the New Science, not essentially different from the medieval impetus theory. This book shows how New Science principles were taught in Jesuit Colleges in the 1640s, thus depicting the sophisticated manner in which new ideas were settling within the lion's den of Catholic education.

Blake's late prophecies, The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem, feature a conflict between the poet-prophet Los and a Spectre embodying all he most opposes: intellectual scepticism, religious despair and a systematic philosophical logic of contraries, which is for Blake an abstraction from, and negation of, his ideal of 'life'. In this 1991 book, Lorraine Clark traces the analogy between Blake's Spectre and Soren Kierkegaard's concept of 'dread', whose spirit of negation and irony he seeks to conquer, in both its philosophical and aesthetic manifestations. Using Kierkegaard's philosophy to illuminate Blake's prophecies, Lorraine Clark shows these concepts to offer the basis for a profound critique both of romanticism, as it has come to be identified with the spirit of dialectic, and of the postmodern irony which it has spawned. Their attempt to rescue an ideal of life from its abstraction within idealist dialectics is itself deeply romantic, and offers a dramatisation of tensions - between scepticism and affirmation, religion and nihilism, philosophy and poetry - central to our understanding of romanticism.

This volume contains essays that examine the work and legacy of the Cambridge Platonists. The essays reappraise the ideas of this key group of English thinkers who served as a key link between the Renaissance and the modern era. The contributors examine the sources of the Cambridge Platonists and discuss their take-up in the eighteenth-century. Readers will learn about the intellectual formation of this philosophical group as well as the reception their ideas received. Coverage also details how their work links to earlier Platonic traditions. This interdisciplinary collection explores a broad range of themes and an appropriately wide range of knowledge. It brings together an international team of scholars. They offer a broad combination of expertise from across the following disciplines: philosophy, Neoplatonic studies, religious studies, intellectual history, seventeenth-century literature, women's writing, and dissenting studies.The essays were originally presented at a series of workshops in Cambridge on the Cambridge Platonists funded by the AHRC.

One of the most iconoclastic philosophers of all time, Nietzsche dramatically rejected notions of good and evil, truth and God. Beyond Good and Evil demonstrates that the world is steeped in false piety and infected with a 'slave morality'. With wit and subversive energy, Nietzsche demands that the individual impose their own 'will to power' upon the world.

Steven Nadler explores an intriguing episode in early modern intellectual history: the expulsion of the great philosopher Spinoza from his Portuguese-Jewish community in Amsterdam. Why was Spinoza excommunicated? Nadler's investigation of this simple question gives fascinating new perspectives on Spinoza's thought and the Jewish religious and philosophical tradition from which it arose.

John Locke (1632-1704) has a good claim to the title of the greatest ever English philosopher, and was a founding father of both the empiricist tradition in philosophy and the liberal tradition in politics. This new book provides an accessible introduction to Locke's thought. Although its primary focus is on the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, it also discusses the Two Treatises on Government, the Essay on Toleration, and the Reasonableness of Christianity, and draws on materials from Locke's correspondence and notebooks to shed light on the contexts of these major works. Locke's arguments for his central claims are subjected to close scrutiny, and his replies to his main critics evaluated. A.J. Pyle takes as his guiding theme Locke's own maxim, that God has given humans enough knowledge for our needs. The philosopher who emerges from these pages is a strikingly modern figure, anti-metaphysical in his attitude both to science and to theology, anti-authoritarian in his politics, and cautiously optimistic about human progress. Locke is indeed one of the founding figures of the Enlightenment, but for Pyle the Lockean Enlightenment is a modest affair of slow and hesitant groping towards the light. As well as serving as an introduction to Locke for students, the book also helps to correct a number of significant errors and misunderstandings that have marred our understanding of Locke and will spark discussion and debate amongst scholars of his work.

Hegel's philosophy has been of fundamental importance for the development of contemporary thought and for the very representation of Western modernity. This book investigates Hegel's influence in the Arab world, generally considered "other" and far from the West, focusing specifically on Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. Lorella Ventura discusses the reception of Hegelian thought and outlines a conceptual grid to help interpret the historical, cultural, and political events that have affected the Arab region in the last two centuries, and shed light on some aspects of its complex relationship with the western world.

This book offers a comprehensive critique of the Kantian principle that 'objects conform to our cognition' from the perspective of a Copernican world-view which stands diametrically opposed to Kant's because founded on the principle that our cognition conforms to objects. Concerning both Kant's ontological denial in respect of space and time and his equivalence thesis in respect of 'experience' and 'objectivity', Ryall argues that Kant's transcendental idealism signally fails to account for the one thing that is essential for Copernicus and the only thing that would validate a comparison between his and Kant's critical philosophy, namely the subject as 'revolving object'. It is only by presupposing - in a transcendentally realistic sense - that human beings exist as physical things in themselves, therefore, that the 'observer motion' of Copernican theory is vindicated and the distorted nature of our empirical observations explained. In broadly accessible prose and by directly challenging the arguments of many stalwart defenders of Kant including Norman Kemp Smith, Henry E. Allison and Michael Friedman, Ryall's book will be of interest to both scholars and students of Kant's philosophy alike.

James Van Cleve here shows why Thomas Reid (1710-96) deserves a place alongside the other canonical figures of modern philosophy. He expounds Reidas positions and arguments on a wide range of topics, taking interpretive stands on points where his meaning is disputed and assessing the value of his contributions to issues philosophers are discussing today. Among the topics Van Cleve explores are Reid's account of perception and its relation to sensation, conception, and belief; his nativist account of the origin of the concepts of space and power; his attempt to clear the way for the belief that the things we directly perceive are external things, not ideas in our minds; his stand on the distinction between primary and secondary qualities; his account of "acquired perception," whereby we come to stand in a quasi-perceptual relation to qualities not originally perceived; his claim that visual space is non-Euclidean; his answers to the questions why we see the world right side up with inverted retinal images and whether a newly sighted person would recognize by sight the shapes he previously knew by touch; whether memory, like perception, is a form of direct awareness; and how we manage to conceive of things that are utterly nonexistent. Also examined are Reid's account of human knowledge by means of "first principles," his externalist reply to philosophical skepticism, his volitional theory of action, his use of the distinction between event causation and agent causation to understand freedom of the will, and his criticism of Hume and anticipation of Moore on the analysis of moral judgment. The most comprehensive work on Reid in a quarter century, this book will be welcomed by students of early modern philosophy, epistemology, the philosophy of perception, and the philosophy of action.

This book provides an account of the unity of Immanuel Kant's early metaphysics, including the moment he invents transcendental idealism. Matthew Rukgaber argues that a division between "two worlds"-the world of matter, force, and space on the one hand, and the world of metaphysical substances with inner states and principles preserved by God on the other-is what guides Kant's thought. Until 1770 Kant consistently held a conception of space as a force-based material product of monads that are only virtually present in nature. As Rukgaber explains, transcendental idealism emerges as a constructivist metaphysics, a view in which space and time are real relations outside of the mind, but those relations are metaphysically dependent on the subject. The subject creates the simple "now" and "here," thus introducing into the intrinsically indeterminate and infinitely divisible continua of nature a metric with transformation rules that make possible all individuation and measurement.

Wide-ranging essays making up the first major study of Nietzsche and the classical tradition in a quarter of a century. This volume collects a wide-ranging set of essays examining Friedrich Nietzsche's engagement with antiquity in all its aspects. It investigates Nietzsche's reaction and response to the concept of "classicism," with particular reference to his work on Greek culture as a philologist in Basel and later as a philosopher of modernity, and to his reception of German classicism in all his texts. The book should be of interest to students of ancient history and classics, philosophy, comparative literature, and Germanistik. Taken together, these papers suggest that classicism is both a more significant, and a more contested, concept for Nietzsche than is often realized, and it demonstratesthe need for a return to a close attention to the intellectual-historical context in terms of which Nietzsche saw himself operating. An awareness of the rich variety of academic backgrounds, methodologies, and techniques of reading evinced in these chapters is perhaps the only way for the contemporary scholar to come to grips with what classicism meant for Nietzsche, and hence what Nietzsche means for us today. The book is divided into five sections -- The Classical Greeks; Pre-Socratics and Pythagoreans, Cynics and Stoics; Nietzsche and the Platonic Tradition; Contestations; and German Classicism -- and constitutes the first major study of Nietzsche and the classical tradition in a quarter of a century. Contributors: Jessica N. Berry, Benjamin Biebuyck, Danny Praet and Isabelle Vanden Poel, Paul Bishop, R. Bracht Branham, Thomas Brobjer, David Campbell, Alan Cardew, Roy Elveton, Christian Emden, Simon Gillham, John Hamilton, Mark Hammond, Albert Henrichs, Dirk t.D. Held, David F. Horkott, Dylan Jaggard, Fiona Jenkins, Anthony K. Jensen, Laurence Lampert, Nicholas Martin, Thomas A. Meyer, Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, John S. Moore, Neville Morley, David N. McNeill, James I. Porter, Martin A. Ruehl, Herman Siemens, Barry Stocker, Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen, and Peter Yates. Paul Bishop is William Jacks Chair of Modern Languages at the University of Glasgow.

Nietzsche: The Key Concepts is a comprehensive guide to one of the most widely-studied and influential philosophers of the nineteenth century. This invaluable resource helps navigate the often challenging and controversial thought outlined in Nietzsche's seminal texts.

Fully cross-referenced throughout and in an accessible A-Z format with suggestions for further reading, this concise yet thorough introduction explores such ideas as:

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This volume is essential reading for students of philosophy and will be of interest to those studying in the fields of literature, religion and cultural theory.